League of Extraordinary Oddballs: STARDUST

Things have been kind of slow around here, so I thought I’d start a series of posts on some of the weirder superhero comics I’ve come across.  In recent years, many of these long-forgotten oddities have fallen into the public domain, leading to reprints in modern collections, but it’s also possible to read many of them over on the great Comic Book Plus site in digital form.

No discussion of weird, twisted comics can exclude the truly warped creations of Fletcher Hanks, so we might as well start there.  Arguably Hanks’ best-known creation was Stardust, a spandex-clad humanoid of undisclosed origins who resided on his own star in deep space but took a particular interest in meting out justice on Earth, which is just as well as Earth is populated by an endless parade of monstrously evil dictators, mad scientists and gangsters in dire need of a comeuppance.  Alas maybe not even they deserved the fates handed out by Stardust, whose powers were nearly limitless but did not include that of mercy.  Here’s a good example:

It’s another typical day in the city.  “Gyp” Clipp and his gang are making trouble again over in the Lower East Side, with typical gangster antics.  You know, like building an “anti-solar ray” that can negate the Earth’s gravity and send all of humanity flying off into space.

Naturally it’s called an “Anti Solar” ray because the Sun is the source of Earth’s gravity, as any school kid can tell you.  Note that the simultaneous operation of a “balance ray” will keep the Earth’s oceans in place while some kind of super-magnet holds all cars and ships fastened down, as well. Or maybe it’s billions of individual magnets, whatever.  The point is these mugs deserve kudos for having thought things through in such exacting detail.  Any other gang would’ve just turned off the Earth’s gravity weeks ago, but these guys took the extra time and effort between liquor store robberies to figure out how to safeguard all the oceans and vehicles on the entire planet.  Pretty impressive for a trio of broken-nosed thugs from the ‘hood.  Incidentally, no name is provided in the story, but I’m calling them “The Yellow Tie Gang.”

Anyway, you can’t argue with success…

Mentally exhausted from inventing all those rays and magnets, the boys go with a low-tech solution to keep themselves earthbound: chains from Home Depot. 

And now all the riches of the Earth are theirs!!!  For all the good it will do, now that human society and its economic systems are a thing of the past.  Also, I hope these guys are really into each other, because they forgot to spare any female Earthlings from space doom.

You know what, though?  Even three’s a crowd when you’re super-selfish. Screw those other guys.

Enter our hero, Stardust the Super-Wizard.  Flying to Earth from his “private star”, he restores gravity and returns everyone to their proper place.  Luckily they were all holding their breath, so it’s okay.

And what goes around, comes around…

Justice is served.  The end.  Remember to eat your Wheaties, kids.

Next month:  Stardust vs the Fifth Columnists.  Spoilers: it’s over pretty quick.

Well anyway it ends quickly for the majority of the gang, turned into popsicles and melted away.  But the mastermind leader of this traitorous gang gets special treatment; he gets to keep his head but his body is transformed into that of a rat before he’s handed over to the G-Men.

“So did anything interesting happen at work today, dear?”

“Not really.  A nine foot tall superhero with biceps bigger than his head materialized in my office and left a half-man, half-rat on my desk.  The usual stuff.  So what’s for dinner?”

At least one book has been written on Hanks and his comic creations as the guy seems pretty ripe for psychoanalysis.  I gather what’s been turned up has not painted him in an entirely favorable light; apparently he was no sweetheart.  Of course at the root of all Golden Age superhero comics was an appeal to readers’ desire to bring order to an era that had gone off the rails, where gangsters and dictators and corrupt politicians and bankers had the world on its knees.  Superman targeted slumlords, fat cats and despots, solving society’s problems in 8 to 12 pages with his muscles and fists, so it’s not like this stuff was without precedent.  But Hanks seemed possessed of an unusual degree of pent-up rage, his four-color surrogates taking a perverse glee in dispensing rough “justice.”  One gets the impression he’s not so much trying to appeal to the desires of his young readers as he is trying to work out his own resentments and inner fury.  And the fact that his art is almost deliberately ugly also makes you wonder: is it just the result of limited art training and natural skill, or do these images truly represent the world as he saw it?  Did he look at these pages and think, “Yep, that’s accurate”? What was going on in that brain?  And do we really want to know?

Anyway, if you’re interested, you can read more adventures of Stardust in the (scanned) pages of Fantastic Comics.